Hand sanitizer is a quick and accessible way to clean your hands when you can’t get to a sink, and many students carry mini bottles of hand sanitizer attached to their backpacks. Convenient, mess-free, and portable, hand sanitizer seems like the perfect product. But what if in instead of keeping you healthy, it’s actually making you sick?
It is a common belief that anti bacterial soaps, wipes, and gels are the most effective way to kill germs and keep you healthy. An article written on the Scientific American website disproves all of that. A study conducted by Allison Aiello, a University of Michigan professor, found, “antibiotic soaps and wipes with triclosan were no more likely than good old-fashioned soap to prevent gastrointestinal or respiratory illness”. This study demonstrated that antibacterial soaps are no better than regular soaps, but they didn’t cause any harm either. It was in a separate study that Aiello discovered, “for chronically sick patients (those with asthma and diabetes, for example) antibiotic soaps were actually associated with increases in the frequencies of fevers, runny noses and coughs”. Although there’s no difference between regular and antibacterial soaps for healthy people, antibacterial soaps can cause those with chronic illnesses to become sicker.
A separate issue linked to hand sanitizers is that they don’t only kill bad bacteria; they kill good bacteria too. Good bacteria are the bacteria that live on your body and are the first line of defense against disease and germs. Bad bacteria are the bacteria that latch on to your body and make you sick. When you wash your hands with soap and water, you get rid of the bad bacteria while keeping the good ones intact. When you use hand sanitizer, you kill the bad bacteria and some of the good bacteria. According to the Scientific American article, “when we are mostly healthy, this doesn’t matter; the bacteria regroup and recover or our body in other ways defends. But when we are already unwell, it may be that this is enough to make us more unwell”.
A Time article sums up this issue by stating, “having identified bacteria as Dirt Vader, we have as a nation come to believe that the only good microbe is a dead microbe”. One of the main problems with this belief is that it leads to the overuse of hand sanitizer, which then causes the development of antibacterial-resistant bacteria. The CDC confirms this by saying, “Non-alcohol-based hand sanitizers may cause germs to develop resistance to the sanitizing agent”. The non-alcohol distinction is important, because alcohol based hand sanitizers are not named as a cause to resistant bacteria, the problem is with sanitizers that contain triclosan.
Triclosan is the harmful ingredient in hand sanitizers
On top of making people sick, a Johns Hopkins study concluded that hand sanitizers may also be linked to increasing allergy risk in children. The article explains how it is important for children to be exposed to certain common pathogens in order to allow them to develop a healthy immune system. If this immune system is not allowed to develop properly, it will later attack harmless substances such as food proteins and pet fur. The study concluded, “children with the highest urine levels of triclosan had nearly twice the risk of environmental allergies as children with the lowest urinary concentrations”.
This topic connects to one that was briefly discussed in class: whether intensive care units do more harm than good. A possible connecting idea between these two topics is that the human body needs to be left alone to heal itself, and putting it in an overly sterile environment only complicates that process. The over sterilization is what links ICU’s to hand sanitizer, and an overuse of either has a negative effect. As researchers are making progress on this topic of hand sanitizers, I am curious to see if they will connect it to the ICU’s.
I found this blog very interesting because I do in fact use hand sanitizer daily. After I eat in the commons I use the hand sanitizer that is available to us, but I may stop that habit now. I did some research on this topic and found everything that you found so there is not much to add. It is crazy to think that something that helps to kill the germs on our hands might actually be very harmful to us.
My 5th grade teacher constantly used hand sanitizer throughout the day. One day it was odd because all of a sudden he cut the habit. As it turns out the doctors told him to completely stop using hand sanitizer for reasons stated in your blog. He found himself to be more sick then actually helping himself, so this was interesting to read and get all the facts on why hand sanitizer is actually bad.